Memoir of a Russian Punk

16

Eddie-baby's life abruptly changed at the age of eleven the day after his fight with Yurka Obeyuk. Yurka was a second-year student and therefore a year older than Eddie-baby. Yurka had the healthy pink cheeks of a boy from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, where he was born, and a strong, healthy body. In Eddie-baby's opinion, Yurka was a complete fool. The inexperienced eleven-year-old Eddie didn't realize that a fool can still be as strong as a young bull. As strong and just as dangerous.

They quarreled. Eddie-baby had drawn a completely harmless caricature of Yurka, a picture of him asleep during class. And it was true that this healthy lad was always falling asleep in the hot classroom. After Eddie-baby and another artist, Vitka Proutorov, put up the class wall newspaper, Yurka pushed his way up to Eddie and said he wanted to have it out with him. "Let's have it out, Savekha," he said. "Savekha" was a name derived from Savenko, Eddie's last name. It was the fashion at the time among the pupils of Secondary School No.8 to refer to each other using the suffix "-kha." Sitenko was called "Sitekha," Karpenko was known as "Karpekha," and so on. As has already been mentioned, Eddie-baby had managed quite well without a nickname during his childhood; it was Kadik who started calling him Eddie-baby, which was hardly a true nickname, since it actually wasn't very different from his real one.

Eddie-baby said, "All right, let's have it out." According to an unwritten law of Secondary School No.8, refusing the challenge would have meant cowardice and disgrace. They agreed to have it out in the empty classroom during the long recess.

The Siberian Yurka beat Eddie-baby till he was unconscious. And in the course of that beating he abruptly changed Eddie's life – in the same way that the appearance of the angel Gabriel changed the life of Muhammad and turned him into a prophet, or the falling apple turned Newton into Newton.

When Eddie-baby regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor in the empty classroom. Several of his fellow students were standing around him with frightened expressions on their faces, and Yurka Obeyuk was calmly sitting a little farther away at one of the desks.

"Did you get the point?" Yurka said as soon as he saw that Eddie-baby had opened his eyes.

"I got it," Eddie-baby agreed. Whether he had gotten it or not, he did at least have a good grasp of objective reality. Accompanied by those who sympathized with him, he proceeded to the boys' lavatory, where they washed off the chalk and dust on his trousers and his black velveteen jacket. Five-kopeck pieces warmly offered by his compassionate classmates were placed over the black-and-blue marks that completely covered his face. And with that the incident was closed.

On his way home that day after school, Eddie-baby analyzed his life, looking at it from various points of view. The whole eleven years of it. When he got home he was somewhat distracted from this process by the terrified cries of his mother and by the need to parry her questions about "Who?" "Where?" and "When?"

Eddie-baby said only that he had been in a fight. "Who" had beaten him up he didn't say, justifiably regarding that as his own affair. The questions as to "when" and "where" were irrelevant, as far as he was concerned.

That day he didn't touch his French kings or his Roman emperors, nor did he open up any of his notebooks or immerse himself in any of his volumes. He lay on the couch with his face turned toward its soft back and thought. He heard his father come in, and he even stood up obediently so that his father could examine the black-and-blue marks and welts that covered his face, but almost immediately he lay down again in the same position with his face toward the wall. When he finally got tired of his father and mother's buzzing behind his back, he pulled one of the cushions out and covered his head with it. Just as his father did when he lay down on Sunday after dinner to take a nap. Eddie-baby, however, didn't sleep. He thought.

He didn't sleep all night. But when he got up the next morning, dressed, washed, and proceeded to the kitchen like an automaton to eat his usual breakfast of fried eggs and sausage, and then took his father's old field bag, which he used for a briefcase, and set off for school, he was already a different person. A completely different person.

Eddie-baby even now vividly remembers that morning down to the smallest details: the bright springtime sunshine and how he walked along the path behind his building, his usual route, in order to come out onto his own First Cross Street, which would take him to school. That day, however, Eddie-baby stopped for a while behind the building under the windows of Vladka and Lyonka Shepelsky, put his field bag down on the ground, untied and removed his Young Pioneer kerchief, and stuck it in his pocket. This gesture had nothing to do with rejection of the Pioneer organization; rather, the removal of the kerchief was for Eddie-baby a symbol of the start of his new life. Eddie-baby had decided to leave his books behind and enter the real world, and in that world to become the strongest and the boldest.

He had decided to become a different person and to do so that very day. Although he had always been quiet and self-absorbed for the most part, that day Eddie-baby made jokes and insolently biting remarks about the teachers, which so astonished the French teacher that she threw him out of class, and he spent the rest of the lesson hanging around the hallway catching flies and sunning himself on the windowsill in the first spring sunshine with the big second-year student Prikhodko. It was with Prikhodko that he committed the first sex crime of his life. They burst into the girls' lavatory on the fourth floor, where several girls from the fifth-year A class were hiding out from gym, and started "feeling them up." Eddie-baby had seen other students doing the same thing, but until then he had never felt any desire to "feel up" girls himself.

During the raid on the girls' lavatory, Eddie-baby, imitating Prikhodko, fell on his victim from behind, a plump girl named Nastya whose last name he didn't know, grabbing her by what might very approximately be termed her breasts. The girl tried to break loose, but she didn't want to yell too loudly, lest they hear her in the classrooms and punish her for cutting gym, so she scratched at him and squealed quietly. Irritated by her resistance and once more following the example of Prikhodko, who by then had managed to pin the truly ample-breasted Olya Olyanich (she was already fourteen) to the washstand and had stuck his hands under her skirt, the green Eddie-baby also thrust both his hands under Nastya's school uniform skirt and grabbed her where girls have their "twats." Eddie-baby had known the word "twat" ever since the second year, and he knew where the thing was supposed to be.

Two of Eddie-baby's second-year classmates had once tried to rape Larka Gavrilov – Tolka Zakharov and the Kolka who went by the nickname "Backstreet Scraps" (his other nickname was less complicated and more humiliating: the "Pisser," in honor of the fact that, as the kids said, he still pissed himself, that is, still wet his bed). They had attempted the rape during the long recess, on the pile of overcoats that lay on the rear desks in the classroom, since at the time they didn't hang their coats in the cloakroom. Even though he's fifteen now, Eddie-baby still has no idea how eight-year-old boys could "attempt to rape" an eight-year-old girl. "What with?" Eddie-baby grins. What sort of penis could an eight-year-old have, even if he was a punk like Tolka Zakharov or Kolka the Pisser? Kolka and Tolka were both expelled from school, but they returned two weeks later.

Eddie-baby seized Nastya by her "twat" under her skirt. There where Nastya had her twat it was very warm. He seized her by that warm area and squeezed. Nastya started bellowing the instant he did so. It seemed to Eddie-baby that Nastya was not merely warm there but also moist. "She probably just peed," he surmised.

In response to the girls' cries, though they hadn't been very loud, the custodian Vasilievna came running in (she and her husband, the hall porter Uncle Vasya, lived in a small house in the schoolyard) and started lashing at the kids with a wet rag, shouting that they were mad dogs and that the proper place for them was in jail. "Run for it!" yelled Prikhodko, and letting go of the girls and shielding themselves from the rag, they burst into the hallway and raced off.